What exactly is the history of the characters of the DCU anymore?
There!
I said it!
The elephant in the room that nobody really seems to want to address.
After Infinite Crisis, I have absophrockinglutely no idea what is and what is not canon and quite frankly, it does effect my ability to enjoy a given story.
It would have almost been easier to have suffered a 100% reboot of the DCU after Infinite Crisis if there at least had been some kind of overriding editorial vision but like so much of collaborative fiction, that really didn't happen.
Now I'm not saying that the Post-Crisis On Infinite Earths DCU had a cohesive vision.
No. That took a bit to build up after 1986 but it did seem to gel relatively well by 1990 or so.
Hell... even the Legion, with all the post-Crisis rebooting, still made more sense to me than much of what has come after Infinite Crisis.
Now I will admit that my pre-2002 habit of buying a ton of weekly books has stopped for some time now. The value of spending $3.00+ on 3-4 minutes worth of read each issue really couldn't be justified at all anymore.
And after Infinite Crisis, both Giga and I really curtailed pretty much everything we bought on a monthly basis to about 3-4 books max.
Because of that, I have had to live vicariously through so many comics bloggers' reviews to even begin to have an idea of what the DC Universe is even like anymore.
But honestly, I don't think it would have mattered if I had bought every post-Infinite Crisis DC comic or not.
There just doesn't seem to be any attempt at a cohesive whole any more regardless of what books one follows.
My rambling train of thought now moves forward and maybe, if you've started to read Paper Crack, you can either point me in the right direction of some blogger that can answer my questions or some source of meaningful data.
Question #1: Exactly what is Clark Kent's origin?
Now I've always been a lover of a simplified Superman.
Yes. The simple Golden Age/Earth-2 Superman's back history, and The Man of Steel 1986 reboot are the Supermen I love.
But this current Superman? What the hell exactly is his continuity on "New Earth"?
Obviously, 90% of more of continuity from the late 80s to around 2000 or so has been made non-canon. And of course, that has to have affected a ton of secondary stories as well.
It looks like once again everybody but Jor-El and Lara survived Krypton.
You've got a totally pointless modern Supergirl that the majority of DC readers (or at least the ones I follow) seem to despise.
The "Death of Superman" can't have happened. The Matrix/Linda Danvers Supergirl could not have happened. And so on.
Hell. Jack Knight's awesome visit to Krypton's past can't have happened.
I... I just don't get any of it anymore. I try reading some of it, but quite frankly, just bringing back a ton of horrible Silver Age stuff coated in modern rewriting just isn't going to cut it for me.
But that seems to be what they've done.
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Question #2: Did we really need to have the multiple Earths shoved down our collective pie holes?
Now I love the multiverse! I was a sad 15-year old the day it was done away with.
It killed so much of what I loved (Earth-2) and pointlessly convoluted so many wonderful characters' histories.
Yes. I was happy to see some a multiverse back and I figured out that some part of 52 would do that.
But... did we really need the multiverse shoved down our throats in such an awful haphazard fashion in so little time?
I had to stop reading Countdown after about issue 4 when it became immediately apparent it was going to be one of the most pointless and poorly written pieces of shit I'd ever lay my eyes on.
And I think that for the most part, most comic readers agreed!
The multiverse... this wonderful storying telling engine when used in small doses was literally made into a haphazard "in-your-face" crapfest!
I've tried to go back and read the Countdown trades and I can't see any purpose whatsoever to this series now that it is over.
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Question #3: When does Final Crisis occur anyway and should I even care?
So I'm picking up Final Crisis but man oh man can a series that is supposed to be a major DCU-spanning storyline have so little impact?
I mean, I'm all for some stories being isolated from others. That's always good. But giving this the "crisis" moniker implies it is significant in some way but clearly, even DC doesn't really view it like that.
I can't even begin to see how this fits into the regularly published titles.
And don't even get me started on how it Countdown to Final Crisis clearly had absolutely nothing to do with this series!!!
At $3-4 a pop for comics, is it too much to ask the publisher to make some damn sense of what the hell is going on?
Do comic readers find this fun?
Is this better than the massive crossovers of the 80s and 90s that at least attempted to seem cohesive?
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Question #4: Why the hell do I even bother trying to read comics anymore?
Let's face it. I sure as hell am not the audience for superhero comics anymore.
DC and Marvel really don't appeal to me anymore because they quite frankly can't make sense of their own properties.
I imagine that they exist today to keep the trademarks alive (in the cheapest way possible) in the hopes that their companies can profit off of the use of these characters in other media such as films, television, toys, etc.
I understand it is a business... but damn... is it too much to ask to have them make some cohesive sense to me.
I really don't know why I let myself get sucked in when I manage to get out!
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